Society

The War Against Human Nature III: Race and the Nation in the Media

Frank Salter

For the intellectual Left that came to power in the 1960s and 1970s, no front of the culture wars is more important than the national question—what constitutes a nation, the benefits and costs of nationhood, the connections between national identity and interests, ethnic and racial differences, and the proper relations between nation, state, immigration, domestic ethnic groups and other countries. Four of the five taboos in the social sciences are related directly or indirectly to these issues: race differences; blaming the victim; stereotype accuracy; and nativism.[1]

Leftist values are not automatically anti-national. In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Western elites often combined affection for their peoples with liberalism, including support for expanded civil rights. The Christian drive to end slavery in the late eighteenth century was not associated with unpatriotic sentiment. Labour movements have often supported protectionism and restrictive immigration in alliance with conservatives. However, as Eric Kaufmann has documented, the internationalist strand in socialist thought rose to prominence during the course of the twentieth century.[2] From before the Bolshevik coup of 1917, cosmopolitans have fought against beliefs that would bolster Western identity and confidence.

One such activist was Columbia University anthropology professor Franz Boas, who helped supplant the nascent biosocial sciences in the United States with the cosmopolitan New Social Sciences. Boas’s opposition to biosocial science is valorised as “scientific anti-racism”, which he pioneered in a famous publication of 1912[3]. The research purported to demonstrate that races rapidly converge on a common type when living in the same country. His goal was to assuage Anglo-American concerns that mass immigration would alter national identity. Boas was so strongly motivated in this direction that he opposed all biological theories of human nature. To that end he abandoned liberal and academic standards. Despite evincing the values of the 1848 liberal revolutionaries, he remained a stalwart of the Soviet Union through the Ukrainian genocide of 1931–32. On the scientific side, he doggedly supported official Soviet Lamarckianism, the theory that characteristics acquired by individuals during their lifetimes are passed on genetically to children. Boas remained a Lamarckian long after the theory was discredited in scientific circles. He approved Margaret Mead’s deeply flawed doctoral thesis on Samoan teenage sexuality that attributed white puberty blues to pathologies of Western civilisation. His 1912 research, a keystone document in the effort to radicalise American social science, was recently shown to be fallacious, not in the data collected by junior colleagues but in the statistical analysis conducted by Boas, a master statistician.[4] Subsequent attacks on biosocial conceptions of ethnicity and nationhood have frequently been tempted to trade truth for ideology.

I am not suggesting that the pioneer leftist social scientists were Soviet agents. But they were sympathetic. For example John Dewey, held by Kaufmann to have co-founded the New Social Sciences with Boas, was not a Stalinist. Neither was he a revolutionary. But he did move in far-Leftist circles and in 1937 chaired the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, organised by a Trotskyist front organisation that included Boas. The Commission concluded that Trotsky had been loyal to the revolution.

A century after Boas the flaws in Marxist economics are understood but communist doctrine regarding the national question is triumphant. This is manifested intellectually in a near absence of biology in media and academic discussions. Politically it is evident in the intolerant utopianism of multiculturalism, revolutionary levels of immigration, and censorship of free speech on the subject.

The loss of this front of the culture wars unhinged the West’s political leadership’s capacity to comprehend ethnic affairs in a growingly diverse and mobile world. The same political elite that was surprised when the Soviet Union broke up into its constituent nations—because they did not regard it as an empire consisting of captive nations praying for release—is also managing the progressive swamping of Western nations by mass immigration. The policy is fascinating from the evolutionary perspective because it is drastically reducing the collective fitness of Western populations. Not everything about the process is new. Displacement of populations through colonisation has been happening since time immemorial, usually on a much smaller scale. What distinguishes the present situation throughout much of the West is that it was not initiated by armed invasion. Instead, colonisation is occurring at the invitation of Western elites, often contrary to public opinion. The process is epochal whether viewed through zoological, national or democratic eyes.

Media coverage

The national question figures large in the Australian media. From September 2011 until August 2012 I collected 215 articles and programs on national themes, mainly from the Sydney Morning Herald (henceforth the Herald) but also from the Australian and selected television and radio programs. The Herald is part of the Fairfax media group, which occupies a position analogous to the New York Times in America, from which it often reprints articles. The Australian is the flagship of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in Australia, which owns most of the country’s print media. The newspaper reflects the Murdoch formula of a campaigning approach to journalism with a neoconservative flavour.

As expected, there were almost no references to biological factors. A rare exception was a Herald report of a scientific study concerning the evolution of racial differences (August 16, 2012, p. 18). Though it was not mentioned in the article, this area of research is relevant to studies of ethnic conflict and diversity because it bears on the significant genetic differences between ethnic groups and races.[5] Genetic differences between groups entail genetic similarity within them, which typically resembles that found among cousins and can be as high as that found among half-siblings or grandparent and grandchild. This makes ethnic groups vast pools of kinship for their members, and helps explain the passions that frequently characterise ethnic affairs.[6]

Another exception to the dearth of biology concerned medical differences between Australians of Aboriginal and European descent. In a radio interview conducted by Alan Jones in July 2012, Dr Alan Barclay of the Australian Diabetes Council stated that Caucasians have a lower prevalence of diabetes than indigenous Australians.[7] He explained that the risk of Type II diabetes rises after aged forty-five for Whites but after age thirty-five for Aborigines, due to different evolutionary backgrounds. Caucasians have had agriculture for many thousands of years and become genetically adapted to more sugar in their diet. Neither man remarked that this information contradicts a mantra of multicultural ideology, that racial differences are biologically insignificant, that they are skin deep because populations have not been separated long enough for evolution to occur. Perhaps medical professionals should explain to social scientists that race differences go down at least to the pancreas and that substantial divergent evolutionary change has occurred in the last 10,000 years.[8]

The most impressive discussion of biosocial themes was on the SBS television program Insight on April 20. SBS provides content in languages other than English and on themes of interest to non-Anglo audiences. Dr Fiona Barlow, a social psychologist in the School of Psychology, University of Queensland, explained that racism has an innate basis. Some individuals are more predisposed to develop racist attitudes than others. Humans have a cognitive bias to remember harmful but not pleasant behaviour from members of other ethnic groups, and to attribute it to that group. That is a “normal, natural” thing to do.[9] The same program showed a video clip of an evolutionary psychologist, Professor Doug Kendrick of Arizona State University, explaining how ethnocentrism evolved. Humans are quick to suspect the motives of strangers from other ethnic groups but are also adept at calculating the risks and rewards to be gained from interaction. The evolutionary analysis of ethnic affairs does not indicate automatic racism. These contributions were valuable but did not fully develop the theme of the normality of ethnocentrism. Not only racism but pro-social values of ethnic and national community have an innate basis. And if minority ethnic consciousness is normal, so is the majority equivalent.

The general absence of biosocial perspectives was evident in the media’s lack of interest in signs of ethnic hierarchy. Pecking orders interest zoologists. They are ubiquitous in vertebrate species. Ethnic hierarchy is relevant to the national question because a fundamental legitimation for government is that it protects the people from conquest. In the Western tradition that is the first duty of sovereigns. A king might have exploited his subjects, but in defence of the realm ruler and ruled shared an interest in resisting external domination. In anthropological theories of the state, hunter-gatherers gave up their egalitarian social structure in the interests of group defence. Still today, in liberal doctrine, liberty from external subjugation takes precedence over citizens’ individual civil liberties within the state.[10] (Libertarians are right to see war as a threat to their values.) This made good evolutionary sense because conquered populations lose resources including territory and, ultimately, reproductive fitness.

Yet the Australian elite media show little interest in ethnic hierarchy, beyond alleging white racism. If provoked into commenting on the subject, many would reply that multiculturalism has done away with the only ethnic hierarchy Australia has known, which saw Anglo-Celtic Australia firmly on top and Aborigines and non-English-speaking immigrants firmly underneath. This thesis makes sense for most of Australian history since 1788 but not in recent decades. Anglo-Celtic Australians are being rapidly displaced by mass Third World immigration that they were never asked to approve, are excluded from multicultural forums, and are the prime targets of political correctness, including a growingly coercive legal apparatus.

Anglo-Celtic Australia’s subordinate status is also indicated by the pattern of media reporting and commentary on ethnic affairs. An element of that pattern is the emphasis on white racism. Journalists are alert for discrimination when practised by Anglo Australians but are somnolent in the case of minorities. This is odd from the biosocial perspective because ethnocentrism is a species characteristic, a universal potentiality. Ethnic networking and other forms of solidarity are usually most intense in minorities.[11]

Following in chronological order are examples of criticisms of Anglo and white Australians.

Sports journalist Patrick Smith criticised Tiger Woods’s former caddie for calling Woods a “black arsehole” despite the caddie apologising. Smith was so outraged that he rounded on the sport itself: “As for men’s golf, well, it is seen for what it always has been. A white sport played and administered protectively by white men” (Australian, November 9[12]).

Herald columnist Ruth Ritchie (November 26–27) reviewed a television show featuring a pair of Muslim comedians who “share, with rapier wit, how it feels to be hated by white people … And their observations about idiotic WASP male conversation is [sic] as keenly observed as any woman’s.”[13]

After describing an English commentator as “a fraud and a mountebank”, columnist Angela Shanahan wrote: “It is an English thing, the Oxbridge talent for shock, fury and fulmination all delivered in the closed-mouthed plummy accent” (Herald, December 24–25[14]).

Peter Gebhardt, a retired County Court Judge, wrote: “Australia Day is, of course, an artificial fabrication designed by governments … and smug Anglo-Saxons to ensure that we forget real history. That Anglo-Saxon smugness is a resilient child of hypocrisy and racism … It is only the resilience and the strength, the honesty and the earth-strength of the Aboriginal people that has enabled them to survive … every conceivable peril placed in their paths by the whites who rely on a specious superiority” (Herald, January 26, online[15]).

Former SBS newsreader Mary Kostakidis wrote: “Commercial television is still the province of middle-aged white male fantasy—non-white faces and older women are sent to Coventry” (Herald,March 3–4[16]).

On SBS television Toby Ralph, a marketing strategist, criticised the negative stereotyping of an Indian actor in a banned television advertisement, calling it racist. He then characterised an actress in the same advertisement as “this pert little Caucasian blonde who is like a sexualised Hitler youth” (Insight, March 20[18]).

In May, Helen Szoke, Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner, stated that Anglo Australians have a special problem with racism not found in other ethnic groups. “People who are part of the majority grouping, the white Anglo-Saxon grouping” deny that their discrimination is racist (Law Society Journal, May[19]). Szoke painted a picture of an insensitive Anglo Australia which is not giving enough opportunities to Aborigines or immigrants of non-English-speaking background: “the white Australia policy is still part of the ‘muscle memory’ of the more homogenised white Australia”. The evidence for this strong claim was weak.[20] Typical for anti-discrimination advocacy from its earliest days, these disparaging remarks were not balanced by a discussion of non-Anglo networking or anti-social behaviour or, on the other side of the ledger, success and overrepresentation in important areas such as higher education, selective schools, the professions, and areas of business.[21] No mention was made of group interests, for example the cost to the Anglo community of affirmative action for minorities or infrastructure for immigrants. Racism is seen only in Anglos and whites. It gets worse. Szoke described how her own family has been adversely affected by Australian discrimination. “Here [Australia], our psyche has been scarred … We’ll have to wait and see what happens”. The components of this story sit uncomfortably together—the categorical criticisms of Anglo Australians, the failure to consider ethnic interests, and the Commissioner’s personal ambivalence towards the same ethnic group that she officially condemns. The combination looks dangerous when she calls for the criminalisation of racial vilification (Herald, August 30[22]). This is not an aberration. The problem is systemic and fits the Left-minority coalition’s broader effort to discourage white dissent and only white dissent.

On Anzac Day, which commemorates soldiers’ sacrifice for the nation, Eva Cox of the University of Technology, Sydney, doubted that Anzac Day was for all Australians because it is “very Anzac Anglo” (Sun-Herald, April 29, p. 86). In his Anzac comment, historian Craig Stockings sought to soften the clash between national identity and the multicultural population by exploding misconceptions about Australian soldiers. True, the Anzac legendary hero is “always, always white”, but thankfully Australia’s behaviour on the battlefield has had nothing to do with its soldiers being Australian, with their national character or “ethnic inheritance” (Australian, April 25). As Peter Coleman succinctly puts it, “Leftist writers, who do not like Australia or Australians, have assembled a portfolio of charges to debunk ‘the Anzac myth’.”[23]

There is also the minority ethnocentric motive, usually expressed in leftist tropes. Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson feels distant from Anzac Day because it is “too white”, despite him also maintaining that race is an irrelevant category. The ritual is nauseating, he says, because it distracts whites from the more worthy memory of his own people’s suffering.[24] Australia’s wars have been fought overwhelmingly by Anglo and other white Australians. So recent was the start of mass non-European immigration—since the 1970s—that the minority segment of the population does not yet figure in the core national identity as accumulated in images and memories of war heroes, veterans, war diaries and correspondence, casualty lists, war memorials and war leaders. The same can be said of our explorers, pioneers, leaders, writers, scientists, and of the imprint of culture, law and political institutions.

The change has been so rapid that veterans can notice. An example was publicised during Anzac Day in 2011 when Jim Wallace, head of the Australian Christian Lobby, commented in an online message that Australians should “remember the Australia [veterans] fought for—it wasn’t gay marriage and Islamic” (Australian, April 26, 2011[25]). He sent the message—which is true—after watching the Anzac Day march on television with his ninety-six-year-old father, a veteran of Tobruk and Milne Bay. The message provoked a storm of protest. Predictably he was called racist, despite the religious and homosexual themes. The message is also true when applied to ethnicity and race. Australian did not fight for diversity or to see their descendants become an ethnic minority. Among the reasons soldiers fight, the most common ideal was probably the aspiration for national freedom. That reality, combined with the Anglo make-up of the Anzacs, makes Australia’s past a foreign country for those alienated from the historical nation.

A Herald opinion piece complained that Australian boardrooms were too white and too male and that both deficiencies contributed to their staleness (May 9).[26]

The ABC2 television program Dumb, Drunk and Racist, June to July 2012, presented harsh images of Anglo Australians.[27] Mainly white Australians were shown displaying ethnic hostility and abusing alcohol. The anchor, Joe Hildebrand, a journalist for the Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph, invited four Indians to fly to Australia and pass judgment on Australian race relations. Indians were chosen because that country has an especially negative view of Australian racism. The show focused on displays of racial abusiveness in interactions claimed by Hildebrand to be purely spontaneous: “The truth is virtually every confrontation, every bit of violence or abuse, was caused by people we just happened to accidentally stumble across—or rather who just came across us.”[28] This seems a hazardous way of organising a costly documentary. But we need go no further than Hildebrand’s own views to detect bias. In the second episode of the series, his response to the view that immigrants should adopt Australian customs was: “not sure what Australian customs there are, maybe drinking, gambling, wearing stubbies”.

Sports reporter Simon Barnes’s London Times article on Wimbledon was reprinted in the Weekend Australian: “I can never watch Serena Williams without being overwhelmed by a race-guilt for all the terrible things that white people have done to non-white people over the centuries” (July 7–8[29]).

A candidate for council elections was reported in the Herald as opposing sharia law and praising Australian in contrast to Muslim culture. The reporter, Nicole Hasham, implied that the candidate was a “racial supremacist” (August 21[30]).

In the context of criticising the federal parliament for insufficient ethnic diversity, columnist George Megalogenis implied that the institution is too white and that whiteness reduces openness: “It has become more monochrome at the very moment we need to pursue more openness—in markets and in immigration” (Weekend Australian, July 21–22[31]).

The Foreign Minister Bob Carr criticised a statement by the Opposition leader, Tony Abbott, that Australia belongs to the Anglosphere. He linked the statement to the anti-Asian views of One Nation founder Pauline Hanson in the 1990s. “With our heritage of White Australia and membership of the British Empire … it’s too risky for us even to glance in the direction of talk of an Anglosphere. It revives all those unfortunate recollections and associations” (Weekend Australian, July 28–29[32]).

In the context of criticising Christian missionaries, Phillip Adams’s accusations became racial: “The spiritual destruction of aboriginal religions throughout the world by white invaders was finally far worse …” (Weekend Australian, August 4–5[33]).

It seems that the elite Australian media do not always report events as objective observers but as participants, and that when they participate in ethnic issues they sometimes adopt a hostile attitude towards Anglo and white Australia but not towards minorities.

The gentle reception of anti-Anglo defamation

Sometimes what is not stated in the media points to bias. The media routinely pass over chauvinism and racism directed at Anglo Australians. An example is Herald journalist Jane Cadzow’s criticism of Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson’s verbal abuse of government officials and reporters as “f**king white c***s”. She did not dwell on the remark’s racist content (Herald, August 25[34]). The same was true of journalist Tony Koch’s original exposé in the Weekend Australian (April 28–29[35]). The emphasis was more on the fact that Pearson had abused a female journalist and done so with language “so foul it couldn’t be repeated here”. However, Koch was able to report Pearson’s lesser abuse of calling government officials and another female journalist “f**king racist white c***s”.

Despite this behaviour Pearson claims to be philosophically opposed to the concept of race, especially in governmental policy. In this view the British content of Australia’s national identity is all cultural. Likewise, Aboriginal identity and disability have nothing to do with race.[36] The National Trust of Australia has named Pearson a living national treasure, something of a contrast to the treatment afforded whites who deploy vulgar racial abuse. Professor Marcia Langton, foundation chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at Melbourne University, defended Pearson’s harsh language by describing it as a feature of Aboriginal English, in which profanities are used as emphatics, “like exclamation marks”. Langton did not insert a sunset clause in her argument, such as a proviso that the cultural excuse expires in the case of a speaker who has a law degree or exerts political and administrative leadership. The twilight of Langton’s argument was when she herself lapsed into vilification by referring to the “Anglo preference for supercilious politeness”. The comment was published without apology by the Weekend Australian (May 5–6[37]).

Also excused were negative views about whites expressed by Gracelyn Smallwood, an Aboriginal activist and an associate professor at James Cook University, made in the context of criticising Pearson. Smallwood made invidious generalisations about Anglos and whites in the Weekend Australian of July 7–8.[38] She wrote that white Australians prefer Noel Pearson’s approach to indigenous affairs, referred to the “racist realities of mainstream Australia”, and opined that Aborigines “have long ago given up hoping that white right-wingers might be capable of understanding such things”. She continued that “Anglo-Saxon pride has been promoted for over 200 years in Australian schools. Just because it talks of being fair dinkum doesn’t disguise its origins or trajectory.”

The treatment of racist language used by Aborigines and their supporters fits the “moral apartheid” described by Herald commentator Paul Sheehan, in which Aborigines are judged by different, lighter, standards,[39] though in the broader picture it is the Anglo community that is pilloried in its Bantustan of blame.

A higher-profile example of anti-Anglo sentiment being excused concerns the late art critic Robert Hughes. Hughes was a prominent expatriate Australian who supported the republican cause in the 1999 referendum from New York, where he was art critic for Time magazine. His anti-monarchical views extended to criticism of the British core of Australia’s national identity. He had unpleasant ethnically-charged memories of Catholic education, expressed in his book The Culture of Complaint (1993, p. 89):

Our education would prepare us to be little Englishmen and Englishwomen, though with nasal accents. We would not be accepted as such by the English themselves: we were not up to that … In those days we had a small, 95 per cent white, Anglo-Irish society … We were taught little Australian history.

The sentiment resembles that of the journalist John Pilger, who ridiculed Anglo Australia as a “second-hand England” in his 1992 book A Secret Country. In his book, Hughes defended the memory of the dead white males who built up most of the Western artistic and philosophical canon. But nowhere did he defend the right of live white people to witness for an identity that still nurtures that civilisation.

Anti-Anglo sentiment is also omitted from recent press coverage of the 1977 murder of anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay (Herald, July 13; July 14–15[40]). The reports failed to mention the ethnic dimension of the crime. A royal commission concluded that a Calabrian Mafia organisation had targeted Mackay, an Anglo Australian. Al Grassby, a pioneering figure in Australian multiculturalism, had been a close associate of the Mafia leader who ordered Mackay’s murder, and had received generous political donations from this individual for many years. Acting on behalf of the Mafia, Grassby subsequently spread the accusation that Mackay’s own family had arranged the murder, for which he was successfully sued by Mackay’s widow.[41] None of this was mentioned in recent press reports. An elite newspaper can be expected to inform readers of such background, indicating that Mackay’s death was an ethnically-entailed conspiracy and cover-up. Despite Grassby’s criminal activities having been revealed, the ACT’s Labor government erected a life-sized statue of him, which still stands, a cold display of contempt for the Mackay family, the Anglo community and law-abiding citizens.[42]

Of the foregoing media reports, two of the largest categories are contradictory. Whites are commonly depicted abusing and stereotyping non-whites but also common is actual abuse and stereotyping of Anglos. No examples were sighted of journalists or commentators defaming minorities. Such behaviour exists but it is rare in the mainstream media, where abuse of Anglo Australia is common. The asymmetry in pecks and the identity and institutional affiliations of the peckers indicates that Australia has an ethnic hierarchy in which Anglos are firmly underneath and an alliance of leftist intellectuals and minorities are firmly on top. The examples also indicate that the hierarchy is not the natural order of things but is maintained through soft totalitarianism, known euphemistically as “political correctness”, consisting of intolerance on the part of the elite media, lack of political alternatives, and intimidation both informal and formal delivered by a growingly authoritarian and openly anti-Anglo immigration industry.

The low status of Anglo advocacy

The media review also revealed a pronounced status difference in Australian ethnic relations. Ethnic minorities are routinely represented by university-educated elites with access to the mass media and government while the ethnic majority is usually not. Rare exceptions, such as Professor Geoffrey Blainey was perceived to be in the 1980s, prove the rule, as does the fury they provoke from the mainstream media and Left activists. The class difference corresponds with institutional support, such that minority advocates are privileged by the establishment while majority advocates are excluded. Minority ethnic activists are treated with respect by government, the media, universities and corporations. They receive positive media coverage, jobs and other perks from the multicultural and immigration industry. They are invited to participate in government forums. Political parties sometimes favour them for preselection as a means of attracting the “ethnic vote”. Activist lawyers volunteer strategy and legal services. Peccadilloes and indiscretions are overlooked. By contrast, majority activists are derided by the media, university experts, minority activists and government officials. There are no jobs for advocates of Anglo-Australian interests in the multicultural industry or in government agencies. They are not invited to government forums. Lawyers demand full payment. Majority advocacy can stunt careers. Peccadilloes and indiscretions become the whole story. Throughout the West, efforts continue to legislate ever harsher penalties for expressions of loyalty to shrinking white majorities.

Vilification of Anglo ethnic consciousness helps perpetuate this difference. The resulting stigma helps silence the professional class that could marshal a powerful electoral and cultural defence of the historical nation.

The class difference between minority and majority ethnic advocates may have been instrumental in the top-down demographic revolution now under way across the English-speaking world. This can happen in a democracy when elites become alienated from the founding nation. According to the best academic study of the phenomenon in the USA, by Canadian sociologist Eric Kaufmann, by 1950 Anglo elites were stepping away from their traditional role of national leadership.[43] Kaufmann argues that this change of heart occurred initially in the upper echelons of the intellectual elite, largely due to leftist ideologues such as Boas driving Anglo loyalists out of the social sciences and literary circles. (The remainder of this synopsis drops the positive spin Kaufmann puts on cosmopolitanism.)

One of the first casualties was consideration of human nature, the scientific study of which offered a prestigious counterweight to millenarian socialism. This changing of the intellectual guard occurred in the United States by the 1940s and was already apparent in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of anti-Anglo ideology dressed up as anti-racism. That was the tipping point. The Gramscian process came full circle as graduates of elite universities conveyed the cosmopolitan agenda to the federal government, including the executive, the Supreme Court, and senior levels of the bureaucracy. The alienation of the state from the nation left the nation without effective leadership and thus ill-equipped institutionally or financially to contest control of centralised government, education and media.

The remainder of the twentieth century saw the mopping-up of uncoordinated pockets of Anglo dissent. One rearguard action was flight from the mainstream churches to evangelical denominations whose preachers were not the products of Ivy League colleges or adherents of progressive ecumenicalism. Despite such resistance, the top-down march of cosmopolitan ideas had a general indoctrination effect. The ability of Anglo Americans to resist electorally was steadily eroded by the mass immigration of those whose ethnic and economic interests usually lay with the Democrats, the party of relatively generous welfare, diversity enthusiasm and porous borders. Coercive measures were also deployed, formal and informal, that characterise multiculturalism everywhere (though in America the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech has been a stumbling block to criminalising racial vilification). This was a repeat of the intolerance originally shown by the left in the elite universities. Kaufmann is critical of the anti-Anglo stance of multiculturalism, suggesting that this endangers the cosmopolitan enterprise.[44]

The process is similar in Australia, though a greater proportion of the intellectual influence has come from overseas. The Anglo elite was becoming alienated from ethnic defence by the 1960s. The Immigration Reform Group, founded in 1960 at Melbourne University, was influential in advocating ethnic moralism that soared unburdened by a concept of ethnic interests. Loyalists have still not found a response to their people’s loss of control over the state. From the 1960s the universities became a stronghold for anti-Anglo activists, eventually leading to school curricula having their civics courses stripped of patriotic history. The present Labor government is intent on introducing a national civics curriculum for schools that teaches children nothing of the country’s Anglo-Celtic and European history. Instead it intends to emphasise Aboriginal culture, Asian geography, environmental sustainability and leftist values.[45] As Chris Berg of the Institute of Public Affairs notes, Australia’s own English and European political traditions are not mentioned in the draft curriculum; neither is individual liberty. And as the Australian Christian Lobby argues, there is no justification for ignoring Western biblical traditions.[46]

The potential for shifting demographics to prevent an Anglo recovery was demonstrated during the 2007 federal election, when the serving prime minister, John Howard, lost his seat to a campaign that pulled Asian votes from him on the basis of ethnic affiliation. One comment that he made twenty years earlier, to the effect that Asian immigration should be slowed a little during times of economic recession, a view he later withdrew, was sufficient to convince conservative middle-class voters of Asian origin to support the party of the left.[47] Race trumped class. More significantly, the commentariat did not hurl accusations of racism at the Labor Party or ethnically-motivated voters. Instead they commended the tactics used. It seems that anti-racism sometimes means anti-white. The foregoing examples of media defamation send the same message. A similar double standard prevents the Greens from opposing mass immigration, which overnight transforms low-polluting Third Worlders into the highest polluters on the planet. In a way, race trumps the environment.

The subordination and steady replacement of Anglo Australia is not due to high principle but an unholy Left-minority alliance. The cosmopolitan Left has abandoned the shrinking white blue-collar working class for new constituencies, including minority ethnics who can be relied upon to vote for parties that keep the immigration door open to ethnic kin. Australia’s cosmopolitan elites are, in effect, electing a new people to replace reactionary Anglo Australia. The fact that the new people are more ethnically motivated than Anglo Australians has not bothered ideologues who are on hair-trigger alert for any hint of Anglo ethnic sentiment.

The concluding part of this article, in the next issue of Quadrant, describes how the national question is treated in Australia’s universities. Are the confusion, double standards and outright anti-white hostility evident in the media occurring despite or because of what is being taught in the social sciences?

[1] Haidt, J. (2011). "The bright future of post-partisan social psychology", Talk given at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, Texas, 27 Jan. http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/jhaidt-819710-haidt-postpartisan-social-psychology/.

[20] The evidence of Anglo racism consisted of a fall in the proportion of Aborigines in government employment, too many whites in advertising and free-to-air television, and a fall is social cohesion.

[21] Wilkinson, P. (2007). The Howard legacy: Displacement of traditional Australia from the professional and managerial classes. Essendon, Australia, Independent Australian Publishers.